Guest Post by Tom Dulaney

Without the Kindle and Amazon digital text publishing, Boyd Morrison‘s The Ark would lie unnoticed under an ocean of publishing house rejection slips.

Instead, The Ark arrives in Kindle and hardcover as well as audiobook format with a fanfare of publicity from Simon & Schuster on May 11.  Tradition says an author hits the big time when his book debuts as a hardcover.  However, that tradition is under challenge, and The Ark stands as a prime example of the emerging power of ebooks and Kindle Nation.

The Ark is sailing through a hurricane of a battle in the book industry over book prices, ebook prices, author’s royalties, control of who sets prices….and so on in a massive complexity the average reader may not care a whit about. Amazon has discounted the hardcover pre-orders 34% from $24.99 to $16.49, but under the agency model Simon & Schuster has set the ebook price at $11.99, considerably higher than the original ebook price at which The Ark’s sales first caught the publisher’s attention.

Nor may they care about Boyd’s financial fate, beyond hoping he earns enough from The Ark to keep him at the keyboard.  If, that is, readers take to this swashbuckling new author who dared scale the heights of publishing.

Boyd, his book, and his experience in the last year of winning the attention of the publishing industry with methods both tried and true as well as iconoclastic and new, may make for an interesting case study on the explosively changing world of books.

The voyage of this Ark reads like a thriller.  The handsome protagonist dreams of being a bestselling thriller book writer.  He doggedly pursues his goal, meantime building an amazing career as a Ph. D. in Industrial Engineering.  To pay the bills, he holds great jobs at NASA, Microsoft and RCA.  Ten US Patents bear his name.  Plus, he’s a professional actor with credits in commercials, movies and stage plays.

Then his wife announces her dream:  to be a doctor.  They make a plan.  Boyd sets aside his dream for nearly a decade.

She becomes a doctor 9 years later.  Boyd quits a stellar job at Microsoft’s X-Box Games Group to write once more.  At a writer’s conference, he’s late for a meeting and sits at the last open table.  Agent Irene Goodman hears about The Ark.  She takes him on as a client.  Two hope-filled, rejection-filled years follow.

“By 2009 we were finished,” Morrison says.

“At about that time I saw that anyone could self-publish in the Kindle store,” he said.  “It was really an afterthought to publish a Kindle version, just something else to do to try to find readers.  I did no promotion—just put the books up to see what would happen.”

As Morrison tells it, the books landed in the Kindle store on March 13, 2009.  By mid-June, he says, some 7,500 had sold on Amazon, and another 7,500 or so had been downloaded from his web site.

“They were selling at a rate of about 3,500 to 4,000 a month by June,” Morrison said.

Meantime, the American Booksellers of America has selected The Ark as an Indie Next Great Read book for May.

Setting all the backstory and hype aside, how good is the book?  Instant review by this reporter: can’t-miss page turner that’ll rob you of at least one night’s sleep.  Every bit the equal of top-of-the list authors’ novels.

Finely tuned, lovingly crafted, relentlessly exciting vessels, Boyd sails his novels into the winds of Fate on May 11, with The Ark as flagship.

A second thriller, Rogue Wave (retitled from The Palmyra Impact), is available for pre-order now, and releases October 11, 2010.

A third, The Adamas Blueprint, releases in December 2011.

Will the hero of this real-life thriller tale overcome all odds?

Well, I’m the last person to play the spoiler.